


Coexist, V.

by momebie (katilara)



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-13
Updated: 2012-05-13
Packaged: 2017-11-05 07:20:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/403826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katilara/pseuds/momebie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is our bare minimum, and sometimes it’s enough. To be in the same room, and to feel there is room for us both. (Taken from @loversdiction.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coexist, V.

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I just want Jefferson/August Booth to happen. I feel like I'm chasing after 'fetch', but oh, am I going to make it happen. This is just a drabble type thing.

When Jefferson opens his door late in the evening August looks utterly defeated. It seems unfair to Jefferson that the night is mild and clear when August is so clearly craving lightning and thunder. “I needed to be out,” he says. “Could you give me a hand?” He uses his wooden leg as a pivot to turn so that he can head back down the front steps to his motorcycle. His limp is more pronounced. 

Jefferson beats him to the bottom and unstraps the typewriter trunk. August stops in mid-descent and raises a hand as if to wave off Jefferson’s help, but Jefferson knows that if he could have hefted the heavy machine himself he would have done so. He carries it back up the stairs and has the trunk open with the typewriter set up at the head of the kitchen table by the time August joins him. 

“It’s gotten worse,” Jefferson says. 

August drops down into the chair Jefferson pulls out for him. He rests his right hand on top of the keys, still wearing his riding gloves. “I’ve failed. She doesn’t believe me and I feel stiff everywhere, like there are roots locking up my joints and my ligaments are petrifying.”

Jefferson doesn’t know if that is meant to be an excuse or a plea, but he isn’t equipped to handle either one. “I’ll be upstairs working if you need me,” he says, and turns his back on the bags under August’s eyes and the droop of his lower lip. They are all tragedies, after all, what good is giving deference to one over another? 

By the time he makes it back to his workroom there is a steady rap of the keys against paper and cylinder coming from downstairs. It sounds almost like rain, the way it is insisting and inconsistent, and Jefferson thinks that he’s invited a storm into his home. He hopes--in as much as he can still allow hope, because he doesn’t trust it--that it will leave the air clearer after. 

He works at his newest map until the tiredness tugs at his eyes and his thoughts have a hard time keeping up with his hands. The typing downstairs is still a deluge. He turns off the lights in his workroom and pauses at the door, wondering if he should send August back home. August is no more of a danger to Jefferson than he is to himself. The man is curious to a fault, proud, and a bit reckless, but the anger he carries inside of himself isn’t directed outward as Jefferson’s is, and there’s nothing in the house worth finding that Jefferson couldn’t live without or defend himself against. 

In the end it’s his exhaustion that wins out. He simply doesn’t feel like he can talk to August in the way that August seems to want to be talked to, so he might as well not even afford him the opportunity. He crosses to his bedroom and closes the door. 

Jefferson carefully unwinds the scarf from around his neck, taking care to not look at his scars on any of the reflective surfaces. He shucks off his trousers and vest and unbuttons his shirt, leaving them all in a rumpled pile near his closet. He’s in bed in the dark when the typing finally stops. 

In his imagination August comes upstairs and slips through his unlocked bedroom door. He removes his jacket and his jeans. He collapses on the bed next to Jefferson. They don’t touch. It would just be enough, Jefferson thinks, to hear someone else breathing in the literal darkness. It would be too much to ask, he knows, to feel someone’s heart beating in the darkness inside of him. 

None of these things will happen this evening. By the time Jefferson succumbs to sleep he has been lying in the dark for hours, afraid to leave his bed, listening for any movement. No doors have been opened. The motorcycle hasn’t been driven away. He is still alone. But somewhere in this massive, empty house, August is closing his eyes. They are all tragedies. Just to know that another person is also succumbing to exhaustion is enough.


End file.
